Music

Saturday, June 25, 2016

Eat That Question: Frank Zappa In His Own Words takes its title
from a song found on the composer’s 1972 fusion album The Grand Wazoo, and there may be no better preparation for the
Frank Zappa revealed in director Thorston Schutte’s extraordinary documentary
than this command to consume, and then presumably digest and defecate out, the
sort of journalistic queries Zappa routinely endured, with patience, smarts and
inescapable sarcasm, throughout his career. “Being interviewed is one of the most abnormal things that you can do to
somebody,” Zappa explains during a TV interview to a reporter whose expression,
an uneasy mixture of intimidation and confusion, remains constant throughout
their encounter.

The composer’s
testy relationship with the media is one of the threads that unites Schutte’s
somewhat unusual approach—there are none of the usual associates, scholars and
friends on hand to tell you secondhand (at best) what a genius Zappa was, nor the
typical glut of chyrons and identifiers meant to orient you as to where and
when you are or to who it is other than Zappa who occasionally speaks, or even the
names of the songs you’re occasionally hearing. Instead, the movie’s deft
editing style conjures Zappa’s history through an assemblage of observational
details—quality of film stock, fashion, the greying of hair— creating a focus which
makes the most room possible for Zappa to express his own musical and political
philosophy, minus the usual overt and covert cultural filtering. “I feel very
strongly about my point of view,” Zappa explains at one point. “I think there
are other people who might agree with it if they heard it, and I’ll do whatever
I can to say my point of view wherever it can be said.” In creating a film that
posthumously allows Zappa to do precisely that (the musician died in 1993 from
the effects of prostate cancer), Schutte has crafted a tribute that might have
gained approval even from the notoriously exacting musician himself.

(Presumably the surviving
members of Zappa’s family are similarly satisfied with the results—the film was
produced in conjunction with the Zappa Family Trust—even if those family
members are currently at odds with each other regarding the musical and financial legacy of their father.)

Eat That Question is a gift to Zappa’s diehard fans (I count myself
among their number), who will be well familiar with some of the places that
Schutte’s film takes them. But even if the film proves to be more revelatory to
those whose familiarity and understanding of Zappa’s music and his modus
operandi registers below the line of fanaticism, it remains fascinating not
only as a document of FZ’s testy relationship with the press, but also of the
press’s evolving relationship with their insistently irreverent subject.

We see the
fledgling avant-garde composer’s early appearance, at age 22, on The Steve Allen Show, performing
“Concerto for Two Bicycles”—using two bicycles, naturally—under the comically
condescending guidance of the host. In a lesser film, this clip would be framed
by talking heads prompting us with perfect 20/20 hindsight to observe what an
asshole Steve Allen was for not noticing or encouraging his guest’s creative
impulses. But Schutte lets the archival footage speak for itself; we see not
only Allen’s good-natured disregard, but also the young Zappa’s sincerity as it
mixes up with his desire to play along with, and gently poke at his host’s
befuddlement. (Anyone who has ever taken pride in appreciating something which
causes their parents some measure of confusion or distress will recognize this
impulse.)

It didn’t take
long, however before that sort of give-and-take playfulness disappeared almost entirely.
Interviews from around the Mothers of Invention period reveal that the musician
had developed a healthy disregard of his own as his music became more and more
challenging, and that disregard was now more often returned by the guardians of
TV culture. At one point, after having resurrected accusations of Zappa having
betraying the hippie movement—an accusation that pointedly does not inspire in
Zappa the sort of defensive outrage that was intended-- the unidentified
interviewer-- Mr. Obvious-- suggests, with no small portion of pity in his
delivery, that “there is a deep cynicism in you.” Without hesitation, Zappa
responds: “Yeah, and I wish more people would catch some of it!”

The beauty of
Schutte’s movie is that it reveals a confidence borne from an absolute
conviction in the ability of its hyper-articulate, yet never hyperbolic subject
to hold the room, even at his most sarcastic, employing a dead-eyed stare that
could and did wilt unprepared journalists unfortunate enough to step into its
focus. Zappa often responded to serious inquiry, however, with cool
thoughtfulness—on the subject of whether or not his songs were largely
improvised, he replied, “The structure of the songs allows for the possibility
of improvisation, but they are pretty thoroughly rehearsed… I don’t like to go
out on stage and slop around”.

But his outrage was perhaps more thoroughly documented. Zappa
relates that attempts at censorship in his career went as far back as “Let’s
Make the Water Turn Black,” a song on the We’re
Only in It For the Money album which was surreptitiously edited by record
executives who misinterpreted a lyric about a waitress at a restaurant (“I
still remember Mama/With her apron and her pad/Feeding all the boys at Ed’s
Café”) as a reference to a sanitary napkin. And it’s a thrill of a very precise
sort to revisit footage of Zappa taking a cool-headed stand in the early ‘80s,
in Congress and on CNN’s Crossfire
program, against the almost comic paranoia of Parent Music Resource Center and
their crusade against rock music filth. (His parrying with Florida Senator
Paula Hawkins on the subject will put a smile on the face of every young Zappa
aficionado who grew up to warp the minds of their very own children.)

It wouldn’t be a surprise if many viewers of Eat That Question took away a dominant
picture of Zappa as an angry maverick tilting at the multitudinous windmills of
plasticized and processed American culture, because in many ways that’s what he
was. But the movie also makes room for the sort of peculiar joy that
characterized his experience too. He actively resisted being conscripted as a
performing front man. (“We’ve been
offered three or four times to play for the big communist party picnic in
France… Fuck the communists. I don’t like those people. I do my music for
people who like music.”)

Yet he embraced, with some measure of shock and
surprise, the expression of appreciation directed toward him by President
Vaclav Havel and the dissident peoples of Czechoslovakia, and after visiting
the country in 1990 he accepted Havel’s appointment as Special Ambassador to
the West for Trade, Culture and Tourism. For Zappa, who had spent 30 years
battling record companies and social institutions and governmental interference
over the expression of his own musical creativity and political conviction in
the land of the free and the home of the brave, it was a bittersweet moment of
validation. Schutte’s film, in laying the foundation for the case for Frank
Zappa as something considerably more than a freak, registers the importance of
the moment and how it resonates with our own current, somewhat freakish global
political climate.

And Zappa himself
took an especially mordant glee in relating how “Bobby Brown,” the viciously
satirical first-person portrayal of a sociopathic, sexually opportunistic
disco-era predator from Zappa’s unusually popular 1979 Sheik Yerbouti album, was embraced by Europeans and made into a #1
hit in several countries, even though he suspected that most who loved it had
no idea what the song was actually about. The image of a Norwegian disco full
of young people slow-dancing to a ballad sung by a self-described “American
dream” who brags about being able to “take about an hour on the tower of power,
as long as I gets a little golden shower” is one of the movie’s funniest
moments. What’s more, the movie inadvertently highlights the surgery done by
Zappa on the song’s entitled, brutally casual protagonist (“Here I am at a famous school/I'm dressin' sharp and I'm actin' cool/I got a
cheerleader here wants to help with my paper/Let her do all the work and maybe
later I'll rape her”), which has a psychological resonance that is welcome, and
unfortunately just as necessary in the aftermath of Brock Turner, as it was
when it debuted during the age of polyester slacks and dangling coke spoons.

Eat That Question is, of course, a forum for Zappa’s
documented verbiage to take center stage, and it does so, at times gloriously.
So it’s curious, from of a movie so focused on words and ideas, that two
specific images should have carried so much weight for me. The first is the
simple sight of the ear-to-ear grin on Zappa’s face as he stands marveling at
the musical invention and sheer dexterity of Ruth Underwood, his superb
vibraphonist from 1966 through 1977, as she rips through one of his typically
intimidating charts. Anyone who hangs on to the notion that FZ was all work and
no play needs to see that grin.

The second comes at the end, our last sight of Zappa in the film, at age 52
and close to death. It’s a simple shot, part of a news program dedicated to the
performance of his late-period classical music, of Zappa, bearded, gray,
obviously weak, waving the baton with focus and conviction as the orchestra
brings forth that signature atonal, rhythmically complex sound and fury.
There’s a serenity on Zappa’s face, as if his shortened life were being
fulfilled right in this moment, which is inescapably powerful.

“In the US especially,” Zappa opines early on in the film, “musicians
are generally regarded as useless adjuncts to the society, unless they do
something creative like write a Coca-Cola jingle… So if you want to be a
musician, you just have to realize that nobody is gonna care.” That’s an
observation culled from a bitter realist, one made in the midst of a career
marked by creative struggle and commercial indifference, and one which the
movie honors. But Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words is, above all else, the empathetically
realized story of Frank Zappa’s journey toward being taken seriously as a
composer, and in its form and incidental testimony it reveals an appreciative
truth that stretches beyond Zappa’s words. For at least 90 minutes that
observation of cultural irrelevance is one that his critics, and maybe even the
ghost of the great American iconoclast himself, will finally be made to dine on.

********************************************

From the film, here’s Frank Zappa on…

Musical Role Models:

“I thought, ‘Boy, if anybody could make a missing like
between Edgard Varese and Igor Stravinsky, that would be pretty nifty.’ Then
somebody turned me on to an album of music by Anton Weburn and I said, ‘Wow,
anybody who could get a missing link between Igor Stravinsky, Anton Webern and
Edgard Varese, that would be very spiffy.’ Then I heard what some of the stuff
sounded like that I had been writing, and it was so ugly that I decided to go
backwards and get into the melodic area again. Then people started telling me
that my melodies were ugly.”

Nasty Language:

“There is no such
thing as a dirty word. There is no word, nor any sound, that you can make with
your mouth that is so powerful that it will condemn you to the lake of fire at
the time when you hear it. ‘Dirty words’ is a fantasy manufactured by religious
fanatics and government organizations to keep people stupid. Any word that gets
the point across is a good word. If you wanna tell somebody to ‘get fucked,’
that’s the best way to tell him.”

A Riot Nearly Sparked by the Mothers in Germany in
the Late ‘60s:

Zappa: “We had one
very negative experience in Berlin. We arrived and we set up our equipment at
the Sportpalast. Some students came over there and they said: ‘We would like to
have you help us with a political action.’ They wanted to set fire to the
Allied Command Center. And I said, ‘I don’t think that is good mental health.’
The minute we came on stage, about 200 students got up and they were waving red
banners and they were shouting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” and they were blowing horns,
and they were throwing things on the stage, and they were calling us the
Mothers of Reaction and they tried to ruin the concert. A few hundred people
were coming toward the stage.

“So I increased the volume of the music. And
this noise was so loud and so ugly, that it was actually pushing them back. It
was like a science-fiction story. Meanwhile, there’s all the other
thousands of people who were sitting there, looking around. They thought
it was something that we might do in the show.”

Interviewer: “There were
reports that you called these students fascists”

Zappa: “I did,
because I think that there is definitively a fascistic element, not only in the
left wing in Germany, but in the United States too. Any sort of political
ideology that doesn’t allow for the rights, and doesn’t take into consideration
the differences that people have, is wrong.”Deficiencies
in American Education:

“People are just
not accustomed to excellence. When you go to school, you’re not given the
criteria by which to judge between quality this or quality that. All they do is
teach you just enough to be some kind of a slug in a factory to do your job, so
you can take home a paycheck and consume some other stuff that somebody else
makes. There’s no emphasis in schools in the United States put on preparing
people to live a life that has beautiful things in it. You know, things that
might bring them aesthetic enrichment. That is not a major consideration.”

His
Image in the Media:

“You don’t see me on normal television
very often, you don’t hear the records on the radio very often. If you read
about me in the papers, they write about me like I’m a maniac. I’m not. I’m 40
years old and I’m normal, I got four kids, a house and a mortgage. I’m an
American citizen and happy to be that way.”

Presumed American Superiority:

“The thing that sets the Americans apart from
the rest of the cultures in the world is we’re so fucking stupid. This country
has been around for a couple of hundred years and we think we are hot shit, and
they don’t even realize that other countries have thousands of years of history
and culture and they are proud of it. And when we deal on an international
level, with foreign policy and we’re going as this big American strong
country, they must laugh up their sleeves at us because we are nothing. We are culturally nothing. We mean nothing,
we are only interested in the bottom line. We have Levi’s, designer jeans, hamburgers,
and Coca Cola. We have REO Speedwagon. We have Journey. (But) we also have the
neutron bomb and poison gas, so maybe that makes up for it.”The Zappa
Aesthetic:

“The easiest way to sum up the aesthetic
would be: Anything, anytime, anyplace, for no reason at all.”

How He Wants
to Be Remembered:

Zappa:“It’s not important to be remembered. The
people who are worried about being remembered are guys like Reagan, Bush. These
people want to be remembered. And they’ll spend a lot of money, and do a lot of
work, to make sure that remembrance is just terrific!”